Global Supply Chains Hit by High Energy Costs

Posted by on

Larry Rohter had a story in the New York Times over the weekend that began to answer one of the questions I’ve had about the embedded energy costs in the things we buy:

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.

The study, published in May by the Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, calculates that the recent surge in shipping costs is on average the equivalent of a 9 percent tariff on trade. “The cost of moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the largest barrier to global trade today,” the report concluded, and as a result “has effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades.”

Everything’s Bigger in China

Posted by on

China is big coal, but also big green, according to Bloomberg:

China is already the world’s largest renewable-energy producer as measured by installed generating capacity, according to a report today from the Climate Group, a coalition of companies and governments that support solutions to global warming. The country is also the world’s top manufacturer of solar cells and will be the leading exporter of wind turbines by 2009.

Albuquerque Water Rates

Posted by on

Joel Gay gives Albuquerque water rates a good, hard look:

“You hit ’em where it hurts — in the wallet,” said Armando Ortega, customer service manager in Alamogordo, which has among the highest water rates in the state. Since adopting a conservation-oriented rate structure in 2003, Alamogordo’s water use has dropped by 40 percent, he said.

But in Albuquerque, where water conservation has slowed to a crawl in recent years, there appears to be little interest in hiking water rates to discourage profligate use. Though the rate structure is up for review and approval Aug. 20, water authority spokesman David Morris said, “There are no plans at this point to revise it.”

If You Want to Know How to Maximize Your Water, Ask the Israelis

Posted by on

Bloomberg has an interesting story about the business of squeezing the most out of that last drop of water. Talk about having skin in the arid land survival game!

Today, some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate change, population growth and food shortages strain supplies. With agriculture accounting for about two-thirds of global water use, the Israeli government predicts overseas sales of the technology will top $10 billion by 2017.

Coal-to-liquids

Posted by on

One of my crude measures of the long range energy picture has always been coal-to-liquids. At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal. Given Appell’s Theorem, it has seemed inevitable to me that, regardless of the climate consequences, people will end up doing this. The question has been why they aren’t pushing it now, with oil north of $120 a barrel? One possible answer is that the people who have skin in the game are not confident that oil will stay there.

Via Daniel Hall, I see that we’ve now got our first live CTL plant proposal. We’re not talking about a huge plant here. Daniel’s take:

It seems to me like CTL puts a backstop on how high oil prices can remain in the long run, at least if coal production is not constrained.  Of course in a world with a price on carbon emissions the CTL fuel is going to have to be a good bit cheaper than oil on a production-cost basis, since CTL involves about 3 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil.

Climate Change and Forecast Skill

Posted by on

I’ve made a healthy journalistic living off of the Climate Prediction Center’s long-lead forecasts, seasonal prognostications about whether we can expect things to be wetter or drier next winter. It got so bad for a while that my sister started calling me Niña-boy.

The thing is, people want to know what to expect. Regular people do, I mean. As I’ve learned over the years, the people with real skin in the game – farmers and water supply managers, for example – are more cautious, planning their lives in a way that is robust to the range of variability they know to expect.

But regular folks want to know what it’s going to be like this winter, and I’ve used a lot of ink trying to tell them.

A new paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Robert E. Livezey and Marina M. Timofeyeva looks back at the first decade of serious seasonal prediction, since the Climate Prediction Center started doing this back in the mid-1990s. Turns out that a lot of the skill in the forecast, they write, can be explained by simple trend analysis:

The inescapable conclusion is that this lead-independent skill comes from use of long-term trends to make the forecasts and we show that these trends are almost entirely associated with climate change.

See? Climate change is good for something.